Published in 1986 and weighing in at more than 1,000 pages, It might be Stephen King’s best book: It’s the kind of unsettling story that digs under your skin and then wriggles through fat and muscle before lodging itself in bone. Alternately horrific and heartwarming, it’s a decades-spanning history of Derry, Maine, where an ancient horror lurks under the streets… and where futile denial gnaws away at those lucky enough—or unlucky enough—to survive.
King’s singular ability to tap into this lizard-brain stuff made him a blockbuster author. Because he’s a blockbuster author, a lot of his books get turned into movies. Because his ability is singular, most of those movies are bad.